


White Lies

by Twitchiest



Series: Apocalypse Girl [15]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Dark, Okay you have to have read the rest to get this, Post-Apocalypse, sometimes the person that looks like a monster really is, this doesn't even remotely stand alone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-03
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-24 15:30:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16177955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twitchiest/pseuds/Twitchiest
Summary: Evan Trevant is dead.





	White Lies

**_One_ **

He won't pretend he's ever been a good person.

Evan Trevant, only son of two doctors, had a list of offenses three feet long when he was thrown in the Pit. It could mostly be summed up as 'fraud'. Much of it was done in the pay of the resistence he'd never been truly loyal to.

But her...

He's always been able to see what she was. She's a monster, through and through. She's cruel, and cold, and there's blood on her hands, thick as his. But she never lied.

Evan could forge himself into One, to serve a monster.

_**Two** _

But he's old, now. He never thought he'd get this far, sixty years old last month, with aching joints and hands that are starting to curl. He's old, and it's a slow, cold winter's day, and he's sat in a corner of the kitchen working through papers from a black box.

These papers built Manor. They gave the locations of the seed depository and storehouses. There are weapon stores Manor's long since destroyed, repositories of knowledge now passed around the world with radios, voices, and hope.

This is sentiment, as she'd call it, rereading the building blocks of their past.

_**Three** _

It's there he finds a folder he doesn't remember. Perhaps they looked at it once and discarded it, useless, and he could imagine why. It's an administrative archive in a bunker not far south of Manor. He should discard it now, keep going just in case there's something they missed all those years ago. Something they could collect now.

Discard this useless piece of the burned past.

And yet.

He raises his head. "Can someone fetch Leander for me?" he says, in a tone clear, and calm, and a young cook is dispatched within moments.

He considers the folder thoughtfully.

_**Four** _

"It's probably just nothing," Leander says, after he's read about the archive. "Old bureaucracy doesn't matter any more."

"It's paper," One points out. "If we recycle it, we're at least saving some wood costs."

Leander shakes his head. "Why do you want to go there?"

The truth is... "I don't know," One says. "I feel like someone should."

They can't send anyone else. Boss still has her rage, not buried deep enough within her to be comfortable. Leander is needed here. The only person who knows how to handle any issues is him.

"That's good enough," Leander says. "Do it."  
  
 _ **Five**_

Boss reads through the folder in silence, then pushes it back to him. "I want to know what you find," she says.

It's not far away. Two weeks, and Leander lays out a journey the way only he can, a looping path around settlements that range from a pair of houses to little villages. It's inefficient, but with a few medical supplies, an old doctor, and his burgeoning apprentice, they can sell it as a trial of their travelling healers. Connecting with the outskirts. Add to Manor's reputation.

One remembers how they started. Better to remind people to stay around.

_**Six** _

He's wrapped up and set in place atop a cart like a travelling prince. He complains about it. Not a person listens to him. He's only four years older than Boss, younger than Leander, and they treat _him_ like the oldest of them all -

Well. One day away from the warmth of his rooms, and his kitchen seat, and he _hurts_ straight through.

Bay, perched next to him, weathers his snide remarks. Manor adores its loyal girl; One is wary, not concerned about her, but...

Her cheer is endearing, but the thing you love can destroy you. He should know.

_**Seven** _

Everyone has their stories.

Four was a kid when they threw her in, a homeless runaway caught in the wrong place, sixteen and instantly idolising the woman who interrupted a man's assault on her by cutting his throat.

Ten was an older fellow even then, imprisoned for smuggling his resistance son out of the country. A son long since vanished, probably dead.

One, though. One is calm, and clever. He avoids talking about the past. It's a distant country of pain and anger, longing and loss, and one neon night.

He prefers the future. The better one, that she's made.

_**Eight** _

Rattling days saved by bright nights. The trip gets longer immediately, when the doctors decide they need to stay an extra day at the first village. One is in charge, but Bay gives him a look, sweet and hopeful, and he concedes. Better that they roam lightly than give away the game.

There's no telling what might be inside the archive.

Instead, he orders people to help. They spend three days at a hamlet of three houses helping a man rethatch his sister's house. One day for the thatching, one for the drinking, one to rest.

Stupid, little, helpful things.

_**Nine** _

They can't find the archive.

"It's under there," Bay says, pointing at a wood. "That's the point on the map."

"It can't be," he says, "There can't be a building under that."

She says, "It's all young growth. Maybe twenty years."

"Everything is young growth," he snaps back.

She tilts her head. "Yes," she says, "But there's old trees scattered everywhere but there."

He tells her to go away and go take down a deer or something. She laughs at him and leaves.

Two days of studying the area later, he realises the archive is somewhere under that damn wood.

_**Ten** _

It's not as if he was ever a country boy. Even when they took up in the old manor house, he wasn't a hunter. He could be a tactician, he could send people out to fight, but he couldn't walk the country roads like he belonged there.

"It's okay," Bay tells him, smiling. "No one else figured it out, either."

That, and the fact that she's actually bringing down one of the local deer every couple days, makes him genuinely feel better. He hates it. He tells her as much.

"Leander says I should call you uncle," she informs him.

_**Eleven** _

Uncle.

There's the catch, isn't it? Leander couldn't know. He doesn't think he ever told Boss.

Uncle.

And he could never be an uncle, now. Couldn't rightly be called anyone's son. He's an old man who sits in a room with papers. A general far from the battlefield.

"If you went back in time and told me where I'd be in forty years, I'd laugh you out of town," he tells her.

She says, "No one can travel in time."

"No," he says, "No, they can't, but we dreamed of it."

She lays a hand on his in companionable quiet.

_**Twelve** _

It takes another day to clear a path to the archive through twenty years of brush. Hours more to get a door rusted shut to open, and the air that flows out of the black interior smells stale.

"Tomorrow," he decides. "And you'll be careful."

"What are we looking for?" Bay asks, in front of their dozen workers.

He snorts. "Information," he says, "Like always. Anything that could help. We have room - just grab entire boxes and have done with it. We'll sort it out later."

Bay nods, but she watches him, and he knows he hasn't fooled her.

_**Thirteen** _

Evan Trevant wasn't a good person. One isn't a good person. Manor is built on the backs of people who were thrown in a hole to die, escaped, and preyed on the country to survive until the world burned. They were bandits before Boss came back and taught them how to turn an old stone house into a beacon of civilisation.

When Bay comes and sits down next to him that evening, he keeps his mouth shut.  
  
She says, in the darkness, "I killed him."

Manor has not asked about Darren, since he left.

"I assumed as much," One says.

_**Fourteen** _

There's three floors of a dozen floors each, undisturbed and still in darkness. It's mostly stored paperwork from some intelligence agency or shadow faction, boxes from project something or other and codeword nonsense. It's about what he expected.

But there's blueprints for devices, and buildings, that they can take back and look through. Three boxes of old recipe books on the second floor, crammed between inventories for safehouses. Copies of the folders they used to build Manor with. In short, it's a relaxing few days spent poking through an abandoned building. He can feel himself relaxing.

Then Bay finds it.

_**Fifteeen** _

She says, "There's a room," and nothing else, looking at him with her bright, honest eyes.

"Show me," he says.

The sign by the door says 'Prison B16'.

Bay opens the door for him, holds her lantern out to show him the rows and rows of metal cabinets. This room shouldn't exist. Officially never existed. It makes no sense for it to exist.

Almost numb, he says, "Where's T?"

There's only one way to know, after all. And in the drawers and drawers of people in folders marked 'deceased', and those who aren't, he finds 'Trevant, Evan'.

And he laughs.  
  
 _ **Sixteen**_

They knew everything.

_They knew everything._

Bay says nothing as he flips through his file. They conducted an investigation after they imprisoned him, determining how he became an undesirable member of society. They even went back to a night, and a young man with more desperation than strength, to a family ripping itself apart over a terrible, awful absence in the middle of it.

He slams it shut.

He closes his eyes and breathes.

He had thought no one knew -

"What is it?" Bay says.

"We're burning the papers in this room," he says.

Quiet. Stillness. Then she says, "Okay."

_**Seventeen** _

She leaves him the lantern. As her footsteps are echoes, he rises and goes to the section marked C.

His hands tremble as he works through. It's not arthritis. Some could call this traitorous, and they'd be right.

The folders around 'Cutter, Helena' are undisturbed. He takes Boss' folder out.

In this moment, he is thankful of his special, light pack. It takes little effort to slide in her folder, Leander's, his own, every single one of the fourteen that came out of the Pit. When he's done, you can't even tell that they're missing.

As if anyone would know.

_**Eighteen** _

Evan Trevant. Black sheep, killer, fraudster with a sideline in helping those who make people disappear.

One, the man who followed a monster who builds a world from the ashes of the one before, from the ashes she made.

As he sits in the night, outside a bunker, watching a bonfire of wood and papers, watching Manor's people dance and sing -

As One sits there, he reaches into his bag.

They largely have what he expects to find. These people haven't hidden their secrets from him, not even Leander, right down to the family history of depression. But the last...

_**Nineteen**_  
  
Boss' folder isn't thin, but the section on her life and history is surprisingly short. It's simple. Textbook. On paper, she's one of the most innocent people who wound up in the Pit. Father, preacher. Mother, teacher. Sister, shop assistant and choir singer. Education, romances, taxes paid, psychological profile.

Everything says she's normal. No one else saw the monster under the skin.

He keeps going. Some pictures. He's only half way through -

_Appeals_ , a divider says.

It's half the folder.

His folder didn't have an appeals section. Leander's didn't. This is -

He slams it shut, doubles over, tries to breathe.

_**Twenty** _

There are letters.

They were never responded to, sent into the murk of a government that could not be appealed, could not be turned or swayed.

The letters are written by her father, a neat and even dozen of them. There are letters written by her mother. There are letters written by Penelope Cutter. They tried.

For years, they tried.

His head swims as he reads. They'd vouched for her good nature, for her innocence, relayed honest accountings of her past. The last, from Penelope, asks that at least she be released for their fathers' funeral.

And yet -

And yet.

_**Twenty One** _

Rationale prevails, at last.

One considers the folder in his hand. The folders, stacked next to him.

He gathers them in his arms. It's not far to the fire, but when he starts walking the aching in his knees sets off. He has to rest halfway. When he's there, people part around him.

He shifts the folders to one arm. With the other hand, he throws each one into the raging, boiling heat of the bonfire.

Twelve, Ten, Nine, Eleven, Four, Six, Seven. Five, Three, Eight, Nine. Two. His own. Leander's. Boss'.

His shoulders lighten as the past burns away.

_**Twenty Two** _

It's the sweep of her gaze as they enter Manor's courtyard, under the shadow of the old manor itself. She's upstairs, leaning on the sill of an open window. That quick check of the incoming group is comfort itself, and her pause as she finds him, meets his eyes- as much as anyone's eyes can over a distance- and nods.

This is the fresh, new world growing out of ashes. There's no time left to go telling secrets.

Evan Trevant is dead.

He breathes easily.

Siti greets him as he dismounts from the cart.

"Come," he says. "We have work."


End file.
